AOL bought Weblogs inc., the two year old weblog network founded by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey, for a number that is rumored to be anywhere between $25 million and $40 million. In this process, Time Warner may be providing some ideas as to the valuation of blogs by traditional media. The power of the network and links Many in the blogosphere say that traffic is not a good measure of what blogs are but that conversation, as represented by links and indexes like Technorati, represent a more accurate view of the value of a blog. As a result, I decided to look at how may sites were linking to sites in the WeblogInc empire. Jason and Brian have been doing a great job at building a stable of blogs but it seems a large portion of their success comes from a single blog. Let’s dig into the numbers. In the following table, I took a look at the list of blogs listed on the weblogs Inc. main site and ran the Technorati site numbers against them (duplicate entries in the weblogsinc list were removed as well as entries that pointed to sites which no longer exist). Weblogs Inc. Blogs…

It seems that my bit of navel gazing about blogs has attracted a lot of attention. Among some of the things that came up, though, is that there is no clear agreement as to what blogs are. So in the search for definition, I went back to trying to figure out what people mean when they talk about weblogs and whether blogs are indeed journalism. If you take Dave Winer’s definition, you end with a definition that is much more limited than thinking of blogs as journalistic tools. Let’s examine the four basic tenet Winer presents as the basis for a blog: A weblog is personal: if that is truly the case, what does this mean for “community weblogs” like Slashdot and Metafilter ? Things they are not driven by a single person, can they truly be called weblogs? And what about the whole trend of companies setting up weblogs? Doesn’t that go against this concept? A weblog is on the Web: It’s pretty much a given (hence the weblog name). But so are web pages? What is the big difference between a Geocities personal page and a weblog? Is there any? Is it just the rate of updates? A…

It’s official: it’s curtain for Napster for now. The judge in a lawsuit filed the Recording Industry Association of America ordered the service to shut its doors by midnight this Friday. The genie is out of the bottle Yet, I can’t help but believe that the shutdown of Napster will not do much in terms of limiting distribution of online music. People will now move to alternative services like Gnutella and Freenet. In other words, it’s time for the recording industry to face the music. Shawn Fawning and his crew did, in the words of the judge, create a monster but I seriously believe that if the goal of the RIAA is to stop widespread distribution of digital music, this lawsuit is a moot point. Back in March, I talked about Gnutella, a Napster-like client/server applications that escaped from AOL‘s vaults. Since then, Gnutella use has increased, largely due to the fact that Napster was being sued and that Gnutella has no controlling authority. Since no one is officially in charge of Gnutella, no one can be sued. And since the service can’t be sued, it’s a much tougher one to deal with as far as the recording industry is…